Consistory

London Metropolitan Archives, MS DL/C/A/001/MS09065B, fols 2v-3r

This website features witness testimony from lawsuits heard in the 1480s and 1490s before the London Consistory, the highest-level church court in the diocese of London. People from the London diocese, which included the city and the counties of Middlesex, Essex, and parts of Hertfordshire, brought their disputes about a range of issues central to their lives to this court. About half the cases involved marriage conflicts, the other half centring around defamation, debt, the probate of wills, and other issues. The testimony of their witnesses reveals much about marriage, gender, sexuality, law, urban life, labour, credit, material culture, concepts of honour and reputation, literacy, the workings of the ecclesiastical court system, and religious beliefs and practice.

The original records are in Latin; these translations to modern English (click here for access to the Latin transcription) are by Dr. Shannon McSheffrey, Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. This project has been supported over many years by the Ames Foundation at the Harvard Law School.

Consistory Court Cases

Thomas Lak c. Ann Munden

This case has a dramatic allegation. It starts with an ordinary path to marriage: Ann Munden made a contract of marriage with Thomas Lak in early January 1482 and…

Agnes Whitingdon c. John Ely

In January 1487, Agnes Whitingdon sued John Ely to enforce a marriage contract they allegedly made in September 1486. Ely claimed he had not contracted marriage with her, although…

Agnes Waltham c. Richard Heth

Agnes Waltham sued Richard Heth in 1487 to enforce a marriage contract she said they had made. Testimony reveals some interesting evidence about neighbourhood surveillance of relationships: one of…

John Croke c. Agnes Hill

The surviving testimony for this suit is incomplete, but reveals some interesting things about a marriage between two offspring of London’s civic elite. In February 1487, John Croke sued…

John Halyday c Margaret Partrich

In 1487, John Halyday sued Margaret Partrich to enforce a marriage contract they allegedly made in June 1486; all that survives is the defendant’s examination. Partrich acknowledged in her…

Joan Austy c. William Codding

This case involves a complicated love quadrangle and allegations of poisoning in Whitechapel on the east end of London. We have in the Consistory records only the February 1487…

Richard Tymond c. Margery Sheppard

Around mid-year in 1487, Richard Tymond sued Margery Sheppard to enforce a marriage contract they allegedly made in May 1486. When examined, Sheppard said that Tymond had urged her…

John Tailour c. Agnes Fry

In late June 1487, John Tailour sued the widow Agnes Fry to enforce a marriage contract he alleged they had made the previous April. Fry herself testified that when…

Beatrice Smyth c John Crote

In July 1487, Beatrice Smyth sued John Crote to enforce a marriage contract she claimed they had made around 1482 while Crote lay ill in a chamber in the…

Alice Rokewode c Peter Hanham

This case offers a rare instance of a man claiming he could only marry with his family’s consent. In November 1487, Alice Rokewood sued Peter Hanham to enforce a…

John Call c. Elizabeth Hertford

In this defamation case, Elizabeth Hertford of Islington was accused of grievously insulting her neighbour John Call, calling him a thief, a cuckold, and various other names (accusations that…

Alice Parker c. Richard Tenwinter

This case involves ambiguous promises and different interpretations of the meaning of sex. Alice Parker probably lived in the parish of St Nicholas Shambles by the butchers’ stalls towards…

William Hawkyns c. Margaret Heed

In 1488, Margaret Heed, daughter of a wealthy London merchant, agreed to marry William Hawkyns, another merchant and clearly her father’s choice. As the witnesses testify, Margaret Heed said…

Ann Styward c. Richard Styward

When Ann, the widow of tallowchandler Richard Alpe and mother of four underage children, married another tallowchandler, Richard Styward, in early 1488, something resembling a nightmare resulted. By Styward’s…

Joan Essex c. Agnes Badcock

In late September 1488, Agnes Badcock allegedly accused a neighbour, Joan Essex, of committing adultery with Agnes’s husband John. The testimony offered by four men who lived nearby is…

John Mendis c. John Adam

In April 1488, several Middlesex men were talking together in the yard of a manor house following a wedding feast when one accused another of being a thief and…

Richard Cressy c. Alice Scrace

Cressy c. Scrace is an example of an uncontested lawsuit, where the point was not for the plaintiff to confirm or annul a marriage with the defendant but rather…

Henry Kyrkeby c. Eleanor Roberts

Testimony in this case gives us fascinating insights into women’s employment conditions and the arrangement of marriage in rural Essex. Henry Kyrkeby’s witnesses claimed that Eleanor Roberts, a servant,…

Office c. Margaret Agmundesham

Margaret Agmundesham’s appearance before the Consistory Official may have been the result of an “office” case (where the court undertook an investigation into a matter under its purview), or…

Joan Ponder c. Margaret Samer

In early 1490, Margaret Samer of Buttsbury, Essex, allegedly said a number of scurrilous things about her neighbour Joan Ponder or more precisely about Joan’s mother: that Joan was…

Office c. John Eggot, John Wyndell, Thomas Auger, John Umfrey, and William Herd

In 1490, five men of the parish of Ramsden Crays in Essex were summoned to the Consistory to explain why they were refusing to pay tithes to their parish…

Christian Hilles c. Robert Padley

The town of Stanford Rivers, Essex, saw a drama of thwarted love and premarital pregnancy in 1489 and 1490. Christian Hilles and Robert Padley, two servants who worked for…

Alice Barbour c. William Barbour

A mind-boggling aspect of late medieval church courts was the employment of “juries of matrons” in suits for divorce by reason of impotence: the court could order a group…

Office c. Giles Eustas

Calculating where a person should pay tithes could be complicated: what happened, for instance, when the lands from which a person gained income straddled more than one parish? In…

Robert Woode c. Joan Patryk

In 1491 Joan Patryk accused Robert Woode, a shearman, of having “cut her purse,” literally cutting the cord from which a woman’s pouch or purse hung from her girdle…

John Bradfeld c. Joan John

Witnesses for this defamation case depict a vivid scene of Joan John and John Bradfeld arguing with one another by the Hythe[1], Colchester’s harbour some distance from the city…

Office c. John Barle

Some amusingly passive-aggressive behaviour on the part of a parishioner in the payment of his tithes in an unspecified Essex parish. John Barle came before the Consistory likely after…

William Pepard c. Alice Mayte

This is an unusual defamation case: a mother, Alice Mayt, publicly accused a man, William Pepard, of having murdered her son, a child. The witnesses give some interesting details…

Marion Filders c. John Arnold

This may be an example of a stalled marriage process: according to the three witnesses, more than two years before, Marion Filders and John Arnold had contracted marriage in…

Agnes Eston c. John Crosby

In 1494, a young servant woman, Agnes Eston, sued John Crosby, a young man from London’s merchant elite. The two had been spending time alone in her chamber, with…